China: Comintern and Guomindang

According to the "East-West alternation thesis," Soviet/Comintern involvement in China began as a reaction to the failure of the KPD to seize power in Germany in 1923. In fact, both the motivation and the timing of Soviet and Comintern participation in the Nationalist Revolution in China were more complex and more interesting than is suggested by the notion that revolution in Asia was a form of compensation for disappointments in Europe. Soviet involvement there is also of great historical significance, for it was in China that revolutionary Russia posed its most substantial challenge to the British Empire.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, China, like Russia, was a great land empire; again like Russia, it was not fully incorporated into the system of colonies and dependencies controlled by Europe and the United States. With its strong civilization and cultural traditions, China resisted European political control, and although the Chinese economy was penetrated by Euro-Americans, with its immense hinterland China was geographically unconquerable in a way that India and Africa were not. However, the Chinese state did come near collapse as the pressures for incorporation into a global system increased—just as did the Russian state.

Although the Chinese Revolution of 1911 preceded the upheaval of 1917 in Russia, the October Revolution did have a powerful demonstration effect for Chinese revolutionaries. It showed the possibility of escaping conquest and dismemberment by Europe and America, of transforming an empire and a national identity without relying on the old bureaucracy and state apparatus controlled by the traditional aristocracy, and of resisting Euro-American domination and control by means that were Westernized, modern, and nationally particular. By the beginning of the third decade of the twentieth century, Russia and China seemed to be in similar positions with respect to the world economy and geopolitics. Was this similarity not the basis for strong bonds between those who had made the Chinese Revolution and those who had made the one in Russia? Were they not "natural allies"? In June 1919, as the victors of the World War were settling their affairs with the defeated Central Powers in Paris, an editorial in Izvestiia recognized China as Soviet Russia's potential partner against

Great Britain, Europe, and America: "Revolutionary Russia will find in China a faithful ally in the struggle against the imperialist predators who are now busy in Versailles soaping the rope for the peoples of the East!"^[57]

In the Bolshevik calculus of anti-imperialist resistance, world socialist revolution, and international power politics, China was an integral of great significance. European, Japanese, and American concessions and privileges in China were, along with British rule in India, the most crucial links in the postwar "imperialist chain." A revolution of national liberation expelling foreigners and their capital from China would disrupt the imperialist world system, critically wound the British Empire, make global politics safer for the new Soviet state, and constitute a first big step toward a revolution of class emancipation in Asia. Ultimately the vast population of what Lenin called "Russia, China, India, etc." guaranteed that the cause of global socialist revolution could not fail. Not surprisingly, the revolutionaries of Russia were eager to establish relations with China. They did so at three levels—with the government in Beijing, with the nascent Chinese Communist Party (CPC), and with the Guomindang (GMD), the revolutionary movement from Chinese national independence, state unity, and constitutional republicanism based in Guangzhou (Canton) and led by Dr. Sun Yat-sen.

The NKID made its first serious efforts to establish diplomatic relations with the Chinese government in Beijing in September 1920, as part of its diplomatic campaign to normalize relations with the states of Europe and Asia.^[58] Both the incentives and the obstacles to regularizing relations between Russia and China were significant. The two countries shared a long border The Russian-owned Chinese Eastern Railway (CER), which joined the Russian Maritime Provinces with central Siberia, traveled through northern Mongolia, making that area one of special interest to Moscow. Outer Mongolia, considered by Beijing to be Chinese territory, was occupied by the Red Army and governed by an autonomous and pro-Soviet Mongolian People's Republic. To consider these matters and to open negotiations toward a Sino-Soviet treaty of mutual recognition, Moscow dispatched a succession of diplomatic delegations. However, no significant progress was made until May 1924, when the Chinese government followed the lead taken by Great Britain, Italy, and much of the rest of the world and granted diplomatic recognition to the USSR. The Sino-Soviet treaty concluded at that time provided for mutual de jure recognition and special Russian privileges in China. The status of the Mongolian People's Republic was regularized as "an integral part of the Republic of China." The Soviet Union retained control of the Chinese Eastern Railway, but

provision was made for China to repurchase it at a future date. The NKID took over the Russian embassy in Beijing, which until that time had been occupied by holdover representatives from the tsarist regime.

Credit for this success went to Lev Karakhan, who, after months of skillful diplomacy and an adept public relations campaign, concluded a settlement with the Chinese minister for foreign affairs and acting prime minister, V. K. Wellington Koo. Karakhan, the Soviet polpred in Beijing until 1926, was thirty-four years old at the time, a veteran revolutionary, and a former Russian and then Soviet deputy commissar of foreign affairs. Since the end of the Civil War he had played a prominent role in shaping Soviet policy in East Asia, and he was one of the strongest voices among the Bolsheviks in favor of turning the world revolutionary process eastward. Shortly before departing for Beijing in June 1923, he stated to Chicherin: "The arena of the internationalist imperialist struggle is moving from Europe, from the Atlantic, to the Pacific, and China is emerging as its focal point. The imperialist powers dread a unified, strong and independent China. Only the Soviet Union is ready to support China in her struggle for total independence."^[59]

Meanwhile, the Communist International was instrumental in the formation of the Chinese Communist Party. In April 1920, even before the Second Comintern Congress, Grigori Voitinskii, a twenty-eight-year-old Civil War veteran and subsequently chief of the Comintern's Far Eastern Secretariat (1921-24), was dispatched to China along with a small number of comrades. There he worked among the radicalized students and aspiring Marxists of Shanghai, Beijing, Jinan, and Wuhan, spending the spring and summer informing them about the Bolshevik Revolution, conditions in Russia, and the revolutionary program of the Comintern. In each city he assisted in establishing party cells and in training cadres in party work. Marxism did not come to China from Russia; it had arrived via Japan, and Voitinskii did not create the CPC. The party was the result of multiple initiatives taken by Chinese revolutionary intellectuals both in China and in Europe.^[60] However, as recent research indicates, Voitinskii was much more than a catalyst or a guide.^[61] His ability to interpret the October Revolution in Chinese terms transformed radicals into Communists, and his considerable organizational skills and efforts started them on the road to forming a party on the model of the RCP(B).

The tactics of the "united anti-imperialist front"—as advanced by Lenin at the Second CI Congress in 1920 and worked out in the ECCI the following year—mandated that the Chinese Communist Party ally itself with the party of national independence and unity, the Guomindang, while

keeping its organization separate and intact. This two-party alliance, which was expected to give CPC organizers access to the proletariat of south China, was rejected by Sun Yat-sen, however. In turn, the ECCI adopted what was called the "bloc within" strategy; members of the CPC were instructed to enlist as individual members in the GMD and to obey its rules. The chief Comintern representative in China personally accompanied Chen Duxiu, CPC party founder and its secretary general (1921-27), and other members of the party's Central Committee to be sworn into the GMD in a special ceremony presided over by Sun Yat-sen.^[62]

That representative was H. Maring (Hendricus "Hank" Sneevliet), who devised the "bloc within" strategy. Maring was a Dutch citizen and a founding member of the Communist Party of Indonesia (1920). He attended the Second CI Congress, served as secretary of the Commission on the National and Colonial Question, and supported Lenin's position in opposition to that of M. N. Roy. Following the congress, he was dispatched to China as the Comintern delegate to the CPC. By July 1922, Maring had convinced the Presidium of the ECCI (including Zinoviev, Bukharin, Radek, Béla Kun, and Boris Souvarine) that the best revolutionary nationalist ally for the CPC was the GMD and that "bloc within" was the strategy to adopt. An ECCI missive, signed by Voitinskii (as chief of the Far Eastern Bureau of the Comintern at Irkutsk), instructed the CPC to work closely with Maring, who personally carried the instruction back to China along with a certificate signed by Radek providing him with cover as the East Asian correspondent for the Communist International and the International Press Correspondence .^[63] To further strengthen Maring's position, the "bloc within" strategy was made public and official in two directives from the ECCI to the CPC in January and May 1923. These stated that the first item on the revolutionary agenda in China was a nationalist revolution against the imperialist powers and their internal "feudal" agents (principally the warlords), that the GMD was the only "serious nationalist-revolutionary group in China," and that the membership of the CPC was to work within the GMD and reform it for the purposes of proletarian revolution and agrarian revolt.^[64]

The "bloc within" strategy was to prove highly controversial and a source of deep disagreement within both the CPC and the Communist International. The Third Congress of the CPC adopted it in June 1923 by a margin of only 21 to 16. It was widely unpopular, could be implemented only very slowly, and inspired continuing debate. Beginning in mid-1924, one element of the party represented by Chen Duxiu and Mao Zedong repeatedly and unsuccessfully petitioned the Comintern to approve a break with the GMD.^[65] In opposition, Voitinskii, speaking for the ECCI, per-

sistently insisted that the "bloc within" be sustained. The strategy remained the rule of the CPC-GMD alliance until 1927, when the alliance came to a violent end, and the "bloc within" strategy became the major issue in the struggle between the United Opposition of Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Radek on the one hand and the forces of Bukharin and Stalin on the other.

The third Soviet presence in China was the money, the military training, the advice, and the weapons the Russians provided to the nationalist movement—the Guomindang—based in Guangzhou. Sun Yat-sen, its founder and leader, was one of the first revolutionaries in Asia to be attracted to the Russian Revolution. As early as February 1918 he had sent a telegram of congratulations to Lenin hailing the success of the Bolshevik Revolution and urging him to continue the struggle against imperialism. He made contact with the Comintern in 1920 and consulted with CI representatives—Voitinskii in autumn 1920, Maring in August-September 1921, and S. A. Dalin in April-June 1922—during their missions to China. Sun's representative to the Congress of the Working Peoples of the East, which met in Moscow in January-February 1922, consulted with Chicherin and Karakhan, two of the leading figures in the NKID most in favor of giving Soviet foreign relations an Asian emphasis, and negotiated what was probably an oral agreement granting the GMD de facto recognition by the Comintern.^[66]

There were nevertheless major impediments to Comintern-Guomin-dang cooperation. Sun Yat-sen was wary of "peaceful coexistence," suspecting that it implied a retreat from the anti-imperialism which he believed united the Russian and Chinese revolutions. Chicherin reassured him however: "Regardless of the future development of our political positions in Europe and elsewhere, our government will never abandon the road of the most sincere, cordial, and faithful friendship and cooperation with the Chinese people."^[67] Moreover, Soviet policy toward the government of China posed difficulties. Moscow regarded the government in Beijing as the official central state authority in China, and the NKID persistently strove to conclude a treaty of mutual recognition with it. Sun Yat-sen tried to derail these negotiations by inviting Karakhan to Guangzhou for talks. When his efforts failed, and the Moscow-Beijing treaty was signed, a majority of the GMD membership reacted with hostility, and Sun Yat-sen found it necessary to take serious steps to quell anti-Soviet opinion in his movement. He dismissed one journal editor who published an article critical of the treaty and he personally orchestrated a favorable official response to the agreement: "Our party thinks that the Chinese people

should express its deepest gratitude to Russia for the Russian-Chinese treaty."^[68]

Preliminary steps toward Comintern assistance to the Chinese Nationalist movement came at about the time that the ECCI publicly instructed the CPC membership to join the GMD. Ioffe, who was in Beijing attempting to negotiate a recognition agreement with the Chinese government, found his efforts obstructed by differences over the Russian presence in Manchuria and the future of Outer Mongolia. In January 1923 he traveled to Shanghai, where he held a series of meetings with Sun Yat-sen.^[69] He found Dr. Sun eager for foreign assistance but disillusioned with the prospect of obtaining it from Europe or America. The two of them agreed that the purpose of the GMD was the independence and unity of China, and that neither Communism nor Soviet institutions should or could be introduced there. Sun Yat-sen informed Ioffe that he intended to reorganize the Guomindang, reform its army, and launch a military expedition against the Beijing regime.^[70] Ioffe relayed his request for financial assistance and for military and political advisers to Moscow. After considerable debate in both the Politburo and the ECCI, the collective leadership (Lenin no longer participated in foreign-policy decision making) decided to aid the GMD, offering 2 million gold rubles, a limited number of weapons, and assistance in creating a training school at which the officer corps of a Chinese army of nationalist revolution would receive both military and political education.

On 21 June 1923—two weeks after the Soviet government had given way on the "Curzon ultimatum" and formally renounced support for revolution in Persia, Afghanistan, and India—five Russian army officers arrived in China. They were the first members of what would eventually become a Soviet/Comintern mission of more than 250 military and political advisers, many of them veterans of the Civil War and graduates of the Frunze Military Academy.^[71] In south China the mission was led initially by General P. A. Pavlov and subsequently by General Vasilii Bliukher (code-named "Galen" in China), the former minister of war, military commander, and head of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Far Eastern Republic, who served through 1927.^[72] The first significant efforts of the south China mission were directed at establishing and staffing a military academy at Whampoa (an island south of Guangzhou) and channeling Soviet financial support to it. (During its first year of operation, the USSR paid the entire costs of the academy.) Beginning in the spring of 1924, the officer corps of the National Revolutionary Army (NRA), the military wing of the Guomindang, was organized, trained, equipped, and politicized at Whampoa. The Political Training Department, headed intermittently between

1924 and 1926 by CPC organizer Zhou Enlei, directed the work of GMD party representatives who were appointed to each of the larger units of the army. By March 1926 there were 867 political workers in the NRA, an estimated 75 percent of whom were Communists or members of the left wing of the GMD. Their task was to identify the Communism of Lenin with the nationalism and republicanism of Sun Yat-sen. To that end, the walls of the academy were adorned with the slogans "Down with Feudalism!" "Let us defend the Three Principles!" and "The People's Welfare Means Communism!"^[73]

The political reorganization of the Guomindang party was the assignment and the achievement of Mikhail Borodin (born Mikhail Markovich Grusenberg).^[74] Borodin was a veteran revolutionary who had done underground work for the Communist International in Spain, Mexico (in collaboration with M. N. Roy), and the United States. His most recent mission before going to China had been in England, where as "George Brown" he guided the reorganization of the Communist Party of Great Britain. He arrived in Guangzhou in October 1923, just prior to the abortive Communist revolution in Germany. There he became, arguably, the most influential foreign adviser of all time.

When Borodin arrived, the Guomindang had no coherent organization, no clear revolutionary strategy, little popular support, and only a few thousand party members, very few of whom supported Sun Yat-sen's collaboration with Communism.^[75] Throughout his stay in China, which lasted until 1927, Borodin worked without adequate information regarding the political situation within the GMD, without much opportunity for contact with the Chinese people, and without reliable communications with Moscow.^[76] However, during his first seven weeks in Guangzhou, Borodin and Sun Yat-sen met regularly and frequently and the two of them reorganized the Guomindang along Leninist lines. Borodin personally drafted a new constitution for the GMD and modeled its organization on that of the RCP(B). At the First Party Congress in November, he saw to it that the resolution of the ECCI Presidium entitled "On the National Liberation Movement in China and the Guomindang Party" was incorporated in the party's manifesto. Communists were accepted as individual members of the Guomindang and three of them were elected to its Central Executive Committee. In 1923-24, Soviet advisers even arranged unofficial discussions between Dr. Sun and representatives of the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party, talks that laid the basis for subsequent cooperation between Chinese and Mongolian revolutionaries during the Nationalist Revolution.^[77]

Despite the introduction of Soviet military and political advisers into the

Chinese Nationalist movement in 1923 and the incipient Leninization of both the CPC and GMD that same year, China played no more than a minor role in the grand strategy of revolution formulated within the Communist International at this time.^[78] The Comintern-sponsored Congress of the Working Peoples of the East in January-February 1922 did not signal a major revolutionary initiative in East Asia. When the tactics of the "united anti-imperialist front" were initially developed in the ECCI, China was not discussed. Even in 1923-24, Chinese affairs received only limited coverage in Inprecor and the Communist International .^[79] And when the strategic problems of global revolution were debated at the Fifth Comintern Congress in June-July 1924, the "national question" (the failure of the October 1923 uprising in Germany) and the "Russian question" (the Opposition within the Russian Communist Party) all but pushed the "colonial question" (revolution in Asia) out of the discussion.^[80] China was comparatively absent from the formulation of the theory and strategy of global revolution until the spring of 1925, with the beginnings of the Chinese Nationalist Revolution, and only in the summer of 1926 did the Politburo and the ECCI decide to support a revolutionary offensive in China. Then the Chinese situation came to occupy the place of prominence within the Comintern's strategic conception of world revolution, and China policy became a major factor in Soviet foreign relations. These matters are discussed in Chapter 8. Meanwhile, as will be seen next, the challenges of capitalist stabilization in Europe and America compelled the Soviet party/state elite to undertake an extensive reappraisal of the future of socialism in Russia, the place of the USSR in the world economy, and the direction of Soviet foreign policy.